The Dictionary of Human Geography (49 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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ecometrics
A term coined by Stephen Raudenbush (see Raudenbush and Sampson, (NEW PARAGRAPH) to assess the nature of ecological settings, using the quantitative methods of multi level (see multi level modelling) and spatial models to exploit spatial dependence in order to improve the reliability and validity of meas ures of neighborhood social processes (cf. con textual effect; neighbourhood effect). Unlike traditional factorial ecology (see factor analysis), which uses aggregate, usually census, data to characterize places, ecometrics uses data on individuals plus systematic social observation as repeated measures of place characteristics. It is also concerned with how places change over time. kj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Raudenbush and Sampson (1999); Raudenbush (NEW PARAGRAPH) (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
economic base theory
A theory that explains urban and regional growth in terms of a division of employment into basic and non basic sectors. The basic sector (B) comprises those industries that meet external or export demand, and the location and growth of this sector is viewed as a function of national and international forces. The non basic sector (NEW PARAGRAPH) (S) is locally oriented employment, servicing the total local population (P). The total popu lation is a function of total employment (E) and the economic base relationships are as follows: (NEW PARAGRAPH) E ? S + B, P ? aE, S ? bP. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The coefficients a and b can be obtained by regression using observations for a sample of cities or for one city or region over time. Growth (or decline) in local population and employment is controlled by changes in the basic sector, and the impacts (multipliers) of such changes can be calculated from the economic base equations: (NEW PARAGRAPH) E ? (1 ab)^1B, (NEW PARAGRAPH) P ? a(1 ab)1B, (NEW PARAGRAPH) S ? ab(1 ab)1B. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A unit increase in B generates a/(1 ab) units of additional local population. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Economic base theory is very simplistic in its assumptions, but because its data demands are simple it has been widely employed in regional economic analysis. It is used, for example, in activity allocation models and Lowry models. Correct identification of the basic sector is crucial, and location quo tients are frequently used for this purpose. Either industries with high indices of special ization are defined as basic industries, or the quotient is used to define a proportion of employment in an industry as basic; so that, for example, one third of employment in an industry with a quotient of 1.5 is designated as basic employment. A more sophisticated approach is to use input output analysis to trace actual inter industrial linkages, but this is very data demanding and expensive. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The major limitations of economic base theory spring from its aggregative nature: the difficulties of sector definition; the dubious assumption that the aggregate multipliers will remain constant; and an inability to trace the impact of particular basic sector shifts, such as a rise in oil exports, on specific sectors of the local economy. lwh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Glickman (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
economic geography
A sub field of human geography concerned with describing and explaining the varied places and spaces where economic activities are carried out and cir culate. The discipline was institutionalized in the late nineteenth century in both Western Europe and the USA, and remains one of the core sub fields of Anglo American geog raphy. There have been repeated attempts to forge links with its seeming intellectual soul mate, economics, but none have held. Economic geography from the beginning was more empirically grounded, concerned with context and conceptually open minded, and at the same time less abstract and less formally theoretical than economics. There were moments when the two became close, but mostly they held themselves apart at a distance (as they do now; cf. new economic geog raphy). Further, unlike economists, economic geographers never settled on a single method ology, set of techniques, list of venerated luminaries, disciplinary problematic or defini tive definition. Change has been incessant, the field continually reinventing itself. It makes for an exciting, dynamic, open subject, one that never looks back, and a frequent conduit for new ideas into the rest of human geography, but there is a nagging sense that before old promises are realized, new ones are made. Economic geography sometimes seems like Penelope?s shroud: spun during the day, and unravelled the same night. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Existing in embryonic form as commercial geography, the discipline was formally defined in Germany in 1882 by Gotz. While commercial geography ?chiefly served prac tical ends?, the purpose of economic geog raphy was ?the scientific task of dealing with the nature of world areas in their direct influ ence upon the production of commodities and the movement of goods? (Gotz, quoted in Sapper, 1931, p. 627). By the 1890s, eco nomic geography courses appeared for the first time in US university calendars (Fellmann, 1986). The first Professor of Economic Geography in Britain was Lionel Lyde, appointed in 1903 at University College London. Five years later, the University of Edinburgh created a lectureship for George Chisholm, who was author of the first English language economic geography text, Handbook of commercial geography (1889). Economic geography was up and running. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Chisholm?s book (published in 20 editions), and J. Russell Smith?s later American version, Industrial and commercial geography (1913), set out an initial disciplinary agenda and intel lectual style that still resonates. The original colonial context of the two books no longer applies, but continuing to remain germane were their concern with empirical detail, their celebration of numbers, their predilection for geographical categorization made visible by the map, their tracing of relations among places through economic flows especially of the commodity, their emphasis on the geographical effects of technological change and their suspicion of theory (although presumably no contemporary economic geographer would go as far as Chisholm ?to wish ... th[e] love of pure theory to the devil?; quoted in Wise, 1975, p. 2). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Chisholm?s and Smith?s emphasis was on the commodity, though neither appreciated the conceptual richness of the concept, with geography coming second. The American geographer R.H. Whitbeck (1915 16, p. 197) argued that it should be the other way around: ?the unit should be the country and not the commodity?. The consequence was an increasingly regional focus, at least in economic geography in the USA, where the region was defined as unique, and repre sented by using one typological scheme or another. Clarence Fielden Jones? (1935) text book Economic geography, for example, used an eight fold typology. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hartshorne?s (1939) The nature of geography later provided at least a splash of scholarly respectability to an ideographic regionalism. But it did nothing to connect the discipline to the fundamental changes that were about to transform a number of social sciences, and even some humanities, especially in the USA, turning on the widespread use of scien tific methods and philosophy (and propelled by the Second World War and later the cold war). Economic geography initially resisted that impulse, but by the mid 1950s it too joined in. The resulting quantitative revoLu tion profoundly altered the discipline, bringing the systematic application of scientific forms of theorizing and rigorous statistical techniques of description and analysis (Barnes, 2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The discipline over the period 1955 75, sometimes labelled spatiaL science, was defined by: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Formal theory and modeLs, many begged, borrowed and stolen from neo cLassicaL economics (rationaL choice theory, general and partial equilibrium, Location theory), and physics (spatiaL interaction theory and later entropy maximizing models) (Pooler, 1977). (NEW PARAGRAPH) quantitative methods, which were ini tially taken off the peg from inferential statistics, but later designed in house to meet the peculiar features of economic geographical data (cf. spatial autocor reLAtion; Gould, 1969a). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The use of computers, at first very crude and limited, but within a decade per forming hitherto unimaginable calcula tions for instrumental purposes. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A philosophical justification based on some form of positivism, the idea that only scientific knowledge is authentic knowledge (see science). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A focus on abstract spatiALities and geometrically defined location (cf. Loca tionaL anaLysis, space economy). Con sequently, the economy was conceived as an independent spatial object, with its own causative powers, morphological form and internal generative processes. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Regions remained part of the economic geographical lexicon, but conceived utterly differently: as explanatory, theoretical and instrumental, a spatial unit to achieve func tional objectives (cf. regional science). The consequence was that people like Clarence Fielden Jones (and his book) were no longer recognisable as part ofthe discipline. They were not in the same field, not on the same planet. (NEW PARAGRAPH) This often abstract, closed and narrowly conceived discipline did not last. It was out of synch with its own disciplinary history, and increasingly out of synch with its own historical moment (see relevance). radical geography emerged during the 1970s, pro pelling economic geography in a different dir ection. Harvey?s (1999 [1982]) classical Marxist theorizing of capitalist accumulation and crisis was important (see MArxism), but even more so was Massey?s (1984) work on indus trial restructuring, which was philosophic ally underpinned by reaLism and culminated in the LocaLity project that dominated British economic geography during the late 1980s (Cooke, 1989) (although disavowed by both Massey and Harvey). Across the Atlantic, a group of radical economic geographers in California carried out important empirical and theoretical work not on cases of capit alism?s decline (as in studies of deindustriAL ization in the UK), but on its successes, such as high tech industries (Scott, 1988b; Saxenian, 1994). Merging British and American interests from the late 1980s pro duced discussions around the transformation of an old, disintegrating fordism into a new, emerging post fordism (Tickell and Peck, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Heavily influenced theoretically by French regulation theory, which was more open ended, and less abstract and determinis tic than classical Marxism, the economy remained central, but it was softened by rec ognition of the social institutions, and even the culture, in which it was embedded. (NEW PARAGRAPH) cuLture and ?embeddedness? became keywords of the ?cuLturaL turn? entering (NEW PARAGRAPH) economic geography from the mid 1990s (Thrift and Olds, 1996). Often drawing upon post structuraLism, there was an attempt to rethink both the larger nature of the discipline its empiricist epistemoLogy, (NEW PARAGRAPH) its entrenched mascuLinism, its economistic logic (Barnes, 1996; Gibson Graham, 2006b (NEW PARAGRAPH) ) as well as particular substantive topics that could benefit from the new con ceptual armature, such as labour and work (McDowell, 1997a: see labour geography), financial and business services (Thrift, 2005b: see money and finance), consumption and retailing (Miller, Jackson, Holbrook, Rowlands and Thrift, 1998) and the firm (Schoenberger, 1997). Such a turn, its propon ents argued, also allowed economic geographers to denaturalize the object of investigation, the economy. Rather than treating the economy as ?out there?, as a single inviolable object, it had to be conceived as a cultural product, fragile, per formed and capable of realization in a variety of forms. In this conception, the line between cul ture and economy is not just hard to see, but is no longer there (see also cuLturaL economy). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The ?cultural turn? is far from dominant, however, and already criticisms have mounted, and new alternatives or versions of old alternatives proposed. In truth, there is still no received view, orthodoxy or standard para digm within economic geography. The current discipline is like a palimpsest, with past ver sions of the discipline still partially visible, not completely erased and continuing to contrib ute to the discipline?s present form. While there is no single leading approach, several areas of the discipline are marked by energetic research and debate: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Discussion of methods is one (Tickell, Sheppard, Peck and Barnes, 2007). In the beginning economic geography was heavily in debted to empiricism (and still is), assiduously collecting numbers and statistics. Even during economic geography?s least numerate period, regionalism, Hartshorne (1959, p. 161) could claim that ?objectivity . . . can best be accom plished ... by quantitative measurements?. That was taken to an extreme during the quan titative revolution, but as that movement broke up during the 1970s it facilitated the prolifer ation of new quaLitative methods and tech niques, including intensive case study research (Sayer and Morgan, 1985), in depth interviews, oral histories (Schoenberger, 1996), ethnographies, participant observation, discourse analysis (Barnes, 1996) and action research (Gibson Graham, 2006b [1996]). It is an approach to methods in which nothing is proscribed and everything is permitted. The upside is diversity and rapid change most of the methodological techniques listed would have been viewed as beyond the pale, or at best, suspiciously avant garde, even in the mid 1980s. The downside, though, is a pre occupation with the instant of disclosure rather than the slower processes of substantiation and extension (Martin and Sunley, 2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hand in hand with permissive method ology has gone permissive theory. Thrift and Olds (1996, p. 313) speak of a ?polycentric? economic geography consisting of a ?set of nar rative communities? that ?celebrate a qualita tive multiplicity of ??economic?? times and spaces?. Those communities include an older mathematical modelling tradition, sometimes refurbished for the new economic times and spaces (e.g., Webber and Rigby, 1996) (but often not); varieties of political economy, loosely grouped around marxism, and fre quently focused on the state (most recently, its role in neo LiberaLism: Peck, 2008); vari ous stripes of feminism that sometimes inter sect with political economy, and often turning on bodies of both men and women (McDowell, 1997a); a range of institutional approaches linked to economic anthropology and sociology (Polyanyi?s and Granovetter?s works are espe cially important) emphasizing embeddedness, networks and social capitaL (Saxenian, (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; and selective theories drawn from sci ence studies (particularly the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway), used to under stand the brute materialities of economic geo graphical activities, from the use ofmachines to the lurching movement of primary resources along the commodity chain (Cook, 2004). The absence of a single approach is liberating (no authority to which to kow tow), but slightly disconcerting (the discipline continually starts anew with a clean slate). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Both permissive theory and methods have been used to understand an issue increasingly preoccupying economic geography from the late 1980s, globalization, and forming a body of research as energetic as its focus of study. Globalization was made for economic geographical study. And in the beginning it was economic geography. Although they did not use the term, Chisholm and Smith were students of globalization. That focus was lost, however, as economic geography became the study of only western industrial economies, and the rest of the world was parcelled up and given over to either regionaL geography or deveLopment geography. Processes beginning from the 1970s, such as the emergence of a new inter national division of labour, the increasing hegemony of multinational corporations, the growth of international financial capital, and new forms of communication and long distance transportation, showed economic geographers that they needed to deal with whole world. Further, under globalization the old intellectual division of labour in geography was not just redundant but obstructive. Dicken?s (1988) work on the geography of multinational corporations (now in its fourth edition) was one of the first to make this point. But he made another, just as important that globalization was no seamless process, eradi cating geographical difference. Globalization represented not ?the end of geography?, as economists portrayed it (O?Brien, 1992b, p. 3), but another form of its continuing importance. Geographical differentiations were the very preconditions for globalization?s possibility and achievement. Dicken and a former stu dent, Yeung (2002), sharpened the point for firms, but similar conclusions were reached for the study of global commodity chains (Hughes and Reimer, 2004), international finance, world wide mega project property de velopment (Olds, 2001), and the international migratory circuit of professional elites looking for elite jobs. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, primary resources and nature have become the focus of an animated disciplinary discussion. For a long period the topic was a backwater, and was almost lost altogether under spatial science. The simplifying assumptions required for spa tial modelling meant that the uneven and lumpy nature of resources were treated as complicat ing factors, the analysis of which was promised but indefinitely postponed. Harvey (1974a) made a powerful case for considering nature along with the economy, but this was not nature ?red in claw?but social nature,?the production of nature?, as Smith (2008 [1984]) put it. The production of nature did not mean creating

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